Whiteout [Hardcover]

Ken Follett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2004

Jealousies, distrust, and hidden rivalries uncover dark secrets, then a dozen vials of a deadly virus go missing. As a blizzard whips out of the north on Christmas Eve, several people converge on a remote family house. Stanley Oxenford, director of a pharmaceutical research company, has everything riding on a drug he is developing to fight a lethal virus. Several others are interested in his success too: his children, at home for Christmas with their offspring, have their eyes on the money he will make; Toni Gallo, head of his security team and recently forced to resign from the police, is betting her career on keeping it safe; an ambitious local television reporter sniffs a story, even if he has to bend the facts to tell it; and a violent trio of thugs is on their way to steal it, with a client already waiting. As the storm worsens and the group is laid under siege by the elements, the emotional sparks crackle and dark secrets are uncovered threaten to drive Stanley and his family apart for ever. Filled with startling twists, "Whiteout" is the ultimate knife-edge drama from an international bestselling author who is in a class by himself.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bestseller Follett sets his sights on biological terrorism, pumping old-school adrenaline into this new breed of thriller. Ex-policewoman Antonia "Toni" Gallo, head of security at a boutique pharmaceuticals company, has discovered that two doses of an experimental drug—developed as a potential cure for the deadly Madoba-2 virus—have vanished from her top-secret laboratory. This mystery is a precursor to a more serious crime being planned by Kit Oxenford, the gambling-addicted son of the company's founder, Stanley Oxenford. Kit, deeply in debt to mobster Harry Mac, sees a raid on his father's lab as a chance to score enough money to disappear and start anew in another country. Some characters are a bit familiar—the pesky, unprincipled journalist; the imbecilic police detective—but others, the mobster's psychopathic daughter in particular, show idiosyncratic originality. After a long buildup, the burglary is set in motion, and Kit's best-laid plans begin to fall apart. Eventually, good guys and bad guys end up at the Oxenford family estate, trapped in the house by a fierce snowstorm as they battle one another over the material stolen from the laboratory. A romance between the recently widowed Stanley and Toni and the unexpected addition of Toni's comically addled mother thicken the plot as Follett's agonizingly protracted, nail-biter ending drags readers to the very edge of their seats and holds them captive until the last villain is satisfactorily dispatched.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Follett's latest is a bio-thriller taking place over a wintry Christmas holiday in northern Scotland and well larded with family drama. Toni Gallo is the driven head of security for Oxenford Medical (aka the Kremlin), a research facility working on a cure for Madoba-2, an especially virulent strain of Ebola. She also has a running feud with her ex, a local cop, and is pestered by the attentions of newsman Carl. But she really wants to be with her widower boss, Stanley, whose daughter Olga's husband, Hugo, is paying unwelcome attention to his sister-in-law, Miranda, herself in uneasy love with a milquetoast boyfriend, Ned, whose daughter, Sophie, is the object of young Craig's budding affections. It is not until midnight on Christmas Eve that all this soap is rinsed away, and the plot kicks into high gear, as a band of desperate, violent thieves, led by Stanley's wastrel son, Kit, lay siege to the well-defended Kremlin in the midst of a terrible blizzard. Predictably, things go suddenly, frightfully wrong. From here on out, Follett's sure hand at the controls of a high-octane plot delivers the expected thrills in expected ways. Expect interest from readers who know what to expect. David Wright
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Macmillan; 1ST edition (October 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0333908414
• ISBN-13: 978-0333908419
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (163 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,606,498 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ken Follett was only twenty-seven when he wrote the award-winning EYE OF THE NEEDLE, which became an international bestseller. His celebrated PILLARS OF THE EARTH was voted into the top 100 of Britain's best-loved books in the BBC's the Big Read and the sequel, WORLD WITHOUT END, will be published in Autumn 2007. He has since written several equally successful novels including, most recently, WHITEOUT. He is also the author of non-fiction bestseller ON WINGS OF EAGLES. He lives with his family in London and Hertfordshire.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars (3 1/2) A Christmas Tale of a Deadly Virus, January 14, 2005

By 

Tucker Andersen (Wall Street) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Whiteout (Hardcover)

This story involves the juxtaposition of two currently popular plot devices. The first is one frequently utilized by the author in several his previous novels - thrillers based on the nefarious agenda of a group with motives related to a "headline topic" of current interest. (E.g. THE THIRD TWIN, which was published during the initial period of the debate over the ethical and practical questions regarding cloning). The second is the attempt by many authors to capitalize on the book purchasing aspects of the holiday season by incorporating (often in a quite nominal fashion) a Christmas element into a story true to their traditional genre, thereby appealing to both their traditional readers and a wider audience looking for a Christmas story. (THE CHRISTMAS THIEF by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark - two star review 12/6/2004 - is an example of this trend.) Unfortunately, Follett's effort results in a novel that neither lives up to its potential nor is likely to satisfy his myriad fans.

The story starts off as a pretty formulaic thriller, Antonia "Toni" Gallo, the security chief at Oxenfeld Medical, a Scottish research firm, discovers a discrepancy in the BSL4 (the most secure BioSafety Level) on Christmas Eve and then discovers that lab tech Michael Ross never returned from his recent vacation. As Toni and her staff investigate, the stakes soon escalate and worries erupt about the potential for a virus to have escaped the lab. Toni is the central character in the novel, her career having been resurrected by Stanley Oxenfeld (the company's founder and research director) after her forced resignation from a promising career in the local police department had left her at a seeming professional dead end. Toni is determined to control the problem, both in order to prove to Stanley his confidence in her was not misplaced and because of the catastrophic nature of the biohazard posed by the involved virus. As the story proceeds, lab security is again breached and the problems of the police, Toni and her security staff, and the perpetrators are compounded by a ferocious blizzard that literally WHITEOUTs the entire landscape.

This engaging and well plotted scenario is juxtaposed with several intrapersonal struggles and potential love interests. Toni is attracted to Stanley but convinced that his interest in her is simply professional. Meanwhile, through an unfortunate circumstance Police Superintendent Frank Hackett is assigned to be the lead investigator on the case; he had unceremoniously ended his romance with Toni when she was forced to resign from the force. In addition, a local reporter refuses to stop pursuing Toni, both for information about the situation at Oxenfeld and to try to convince her to date him. At the same time, Stanley's Oxenfeld's dysfunctional family is gathering at his remote country house for the Christmas holidays, and when Toni is invited she is appalled that she will be forced to interact with Stanley's son Kit, who was fired by his father based on evidence of theft that Toni uncovered. A further complicating factor is the role in the story that will be played by the attraction of Stanley's teenage grandson Craig (Stanley's daughter Olga's son) to Sophie (the sullen daughter of the fiancé of Stanley's other daughter Miranda). Of course, the villains also are an intriguing group, especially Daisy, who seems to be a true sociopath.

This is a very easy and enjoyable book to read - it is fast paced with the chapter titles consisting of the time sequence of the events evolved; it is composed of short chapters (longer than James Patterson but in his style) which alternate among the various participants. It contains some occasionally moving sequences regarding human emotion, and the idea is actually quite clever. In addition, Toni Gallo is a an interesting and well developed character.

However, despite the fun that I had reading it, it was not what I or probably other Follett readers expect and certainly not the book that "rockets Follett to a class by himself" as the dust jacket claims. The ending becomes foreordained, and while I actually appreciate that Follett concluded the story without the seeming obligatory violence and landscape strewn with dead bodies that authors of this genre often employ, the story gradually deteriorated from the standard thriller to a Christmas tale of love and betrayal, and the attempt to provide a feelgood ending went beyond the believable, particularly the last two pages of an unnecessary final chapter. For most of the time that I was reading this book, I felt sure that my rating would be a minimum of four stars. And I still want to emphasize that it is an enjoyable read and many individuals may consider it to be an interesting story; it will probably be especially attractive for speedreaders because there are few nuances and there is little need to worry about complexities. Nevertheless, I decided to round down my final rating to three stars because my reaction to the contrived conclusion was so lukewarm that the more I contemplated the story in preparing this review the more I realized how disappointing it was in comparison with many of the author's previous efforts.

Tucker Andersen

44 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Blizzard of Bio-Terror, November 28, 2004

By 

Gary Griffiths (Los Altos Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Whiteout (Hardcover)

Set in Oxenford Medical, a biomedical facility in Scotland, a lab technician is found dead at home, presumably the victim of a deadly Ebola virus variant housed at the facility. Beautiful and brainy females are often front-and-center in Ken Follett novels; in "Whiteout" it is Toni Gallo, former cop and current director of security for Oxenford, developer of anti-viral drugs to combat these deadly viruses. It is these drugs that attract the attention of a band of international burglars, commissioned by a presumed competitor to steal Oxenford's latest research. Kit Oxenford, the spoiled and sniveling son of Oxenford founder and CEO Stanley Oxenford, was the designer of the lab's security systems before being dumped from the firm for embezzlement. Up to his eyeballs in gambling debt and furious with his father for not cashing him out, the despicable Kit joins the band of thugs, providing all the information needed to override Oxenford security. But as the freak Christmas Eve storm shifts course towards the Scottish coast, this story of high-tech thievery becomes a tale as much about the weather as it is about bio-terrorism.

While this unlikely story is predictable and a bit over embellished, it is nonetheless gripping entertainment, hooking the reader in the first few pages and keeping them turning until the last bad guy is finally dispatched. Follett is never one to let rationality get in the way of a good story, and "Whiteout" is no exception - to the reader's benefit. A bit of a Robin Cook bio-thriller with some "Die Hard" thrown in, Follett's lean prose demonstrates again his uncanny ability as a storyteller, cranking out page-after page of non-stop action unadorned by fine literary baggage. While few characters in "Whiteout" are memorable, the brutish "Daisy" adds an interesting new dimension to the familiar psycho-thug, while the terminally dysfunctional Oxenford family provided some black comedy along with critical plot content. As long as the reader doesn't spend inordinate time dissecting the plot or the characters, and isn't overly distracted by some heavy-handed schmaltz, "Whiteout" is indeed terrific entertainment - the written-word version of that holiday season film the critics love to hate but viewers love to see.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining Garbage, August 21, 2005

By 

N. Bilmes "bookaholic" (Vernon, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Whiteout (Hardcover)

Positive Points:

1) The book never slows down

2) The story is entertaining and timely

3) No deep thinking is needed to understand the plot or cartoonish characters

Negatives:

1) The writing is horrible and cheesy (especially a very laughable scene involving a swimming pool)

2) Poorly drawn characters who lack any depth

3) Predictable beyond belief

Overall:

I enjoyed it, but felt like I'd just read the literary equivalent of a Taco Bell Grande Burrito!